arXiv subjects

C. Trevor Gaunt

Publications and source records attributed to C. Trevor Gaunt.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Reproducible Method for Mapping Electricity Transmission Infrastructure for Space Weather Risk Assessment

Space weather risk assessment is constrained by the lack of available asset information needed to model geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) in electricity transmission infrastructure. We propose a systematic method that enables risk analysts to collect their own open-source substation data. Using a web browser platform for annotation, we convert OpenStreetMap (OSM) substation locations into high-resolution, component-level mappings of electricity transmission assets. We convert an initial 1,313 high-voltage (>=230 kV) substations to 52,273 components using low-altitude, satellite, and Street View imagery accessed through Google Earth, identifying 7,949 transformers. Compared to the OSM baseline, this approach provides detailed insights on voltage levels and substation configurations. We then construct a geospatial GIC network for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) region, comparing May 2024 results with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 150-bus (UIUC150) synthetic network and with measured ground GICs at 13 monitoring devices. The transformer types at unannotated substations and the grounding resistances are unknown, so we sample both across a Monte Carlo ensemble. This gives a median TVA 95th-percentile peak ground GIC of 29.1 A, with a 90 percent confidence interval of 23.9-36.1 A. The UIUC150 network yields a 95th-percentile peak ground GIC of 35.8 A under the same forcing, falling within this interval, and the modeled time series broadly capture the temporal morphology of the geomagnetic storm at the monitoring sites. This method shows promise for spatially explicit, screening-level GIC assessment without requiring access to operator data.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2026

Major Space Weather Risks Identified via Coupled Physics-Engineering-Economic Modeling

Space weather poses an important but under-quantified threat to society. While severe geomagnetic storms are recognized as potential global catastrophes, their socio-economic impacts remain poorly quantified. We present a novel physics-engineering-economic framework that links geophysical drivers to power grid geoelectric fields, transformer vulnerability, and macroeconomic consequences. Using the United States as an example, we estimate daily U.S. economic losses for a 250-year geomagnetic storm from transformer thermal heating of 2.04 billion USD (95 percent confidence interval: 1.86 to 2.22 billion USD), disrupting power for approximately 5.7 million people and 150,000 businesses. These estimates are conservative lower bounds, reflecting only transformer thermal heating effects and excluding voltage collapse, cascading failures, and restoration costs. The true societal risk is likely substantially higher. Nonetheless, the contribution is in providing the first nationwide end-to-end coupling from space physics to potential macroeconomic loss, with quantified uncertainties. Our results demonstrate that coupled socio-economic modeling of space weather is both feasible and essential, and the framework is scalable and transferable, offering a template for assessing space weather risk to critical infrastructure in other countries.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2022

Space Plasma Physics: A Review

Owing to the ever-present solar wind, our vast solar system is full of plasmas. The turbulent solar wind, together with sporadic solar eruptions, introduces various space plasma processes and phenomena in the solar atmosphere all the way to the Earth's ionosphere and atmosphere and outward to interact with the interstellar media to form the heliopause and termination shock. Remarkable progress has been made in space plasma physics in the last 65 years, mainly due to sophisticated in-situ measurements of plasmas, plasma waves, neutral particles, energetic particles, and dust via space-borne satellite instrumentation. Additionally high technology ground-based instrumentation has led to new and greater knowledge of solar and auroral features. As a result, a new branch of space physics, i.e., space weather, has emerged since many of the space physics processes have a direct or indirect influence on humankind. After briefly reviewing the major space physics discoveries before rockets and satellites, we aim to review all our updated understanding on coronal holes, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which are central to space weather events at Earth, solar wind, storms and substorms, magnetotail and substorms, emphasizing the role of the magnetotail in substorm dynamics, radiation belts/energetic magnetospheric particles, structures and space weather dynamics in the ionosphere, plasma waves, instabilities, and wave-particle interactions, long-period geomagnetic pulsations, auroras, geomagnetically induced currents (GICs), planetary magnetospheres and solar/stellar wind interactions with comets, moons and asteroids, interplanetary discontinuities, shocks and waves, interplanetary dust, space dusty plasmas and solar energetic particles and shocks, including the heliospheric termination shock. This paper is aimed to provide a panoramic view of space physics and space weather.

physics.space-ph↗